arXiv:1604.04722v2

1 Why we should not

1 Why we should not study transnational corporate elites With the growing internationalization of business during the second half of the twentieth century, critical scholars increasingly saw a development where the elites who own and control corporations cease to be organized or divided along national lines. Instead, they expect the formation of a ‘transnational capitalist class’ (Burris and Staples, 2012, pp. 324). They predicted that the national identities of corporate elites would be replaced by a common transnational identity with a shared sense of economic interests and an enhanced capacity for unified political action (Robinson, 2004; Sklair, 2001). Robinson, for instance, holds in his Theory of Global Capitalism that the dynamics that caused the formation of national capitalist classes, are now unfolding on a transnational scale. After the hegemonic periods of respectively Holland, Britain and the US, “the baton is being passed to an emerging transnational configuration” and “we are witness to an emerging transnational hegemony in a process that is contested and far from finished, the emergence of a new historic block that is global in scope and based on the hegemony of transnational capital” (Robinson, 2004, pp. 77). Robinson expects that the main contradictions that emerge in the process of globalization will be between the nationally oriented bourgeoisie and the elites that have an interest beyond the nation states boundaries. Unfortunately, much of the literature on the emergence of a transnational capitalist class drew on a mixture of anecdotal evidence and theoretically informed speculation, as is rightly pointed out by (Burris and Staples, 2012, pp. 324). Notable exceptions exist however. Fennema (1982), for instance, was the first to empirically analyze the transnational network of interlocking directorates directors that sit on the boards of two companies and thus form a connection between the two firms. He found that by 1970 there was an Atlantic component of interlocking directorates, which had national clusters connected by international interlocks. By 1976 this network had become much more transnational; the number of international interlocks in the Atlantic component had increased by 50 percent. However, the transnational network of board interlocks was primarily established between neighboring countries in Europe, crossed to a lesser extent the Atlantic, and hardly connected upcoming economic regions in Asia or the rest of the world (Fennema, 1982). Board interlocks proved a helpful element in the empirical studies on social corporate elite organization. Scholars have argued that board interlocks serve to reduce economic uncertainty and secure resources from banks and suppliers. Others see them as a mean to maintain class cohesion (Mills, 1956; Zeitlin, 1974), integrate new elites and facilitate class-wide political action (Domhoff, 1970). Other perspectives hold that board interlocks together form a communication 2

system and provide a ‘business scan’ (Useem, 1984) allowing for the spread of business strategies and information about (future) economic trends and challenges (see Davis and Greve (1997), or Mizruchi (1996) for a review). Of course, we should not reduce the entire (transnational) corporate elite community (and its various sources of integration) to the practice of interlocking corporate directorships. For sure, there are many key actors in the business community outside the set of corporate board members, such as lawyers, accountants, but also fund managers and perhaps even regulators. Yet, whatever their purpose, board interlocks are present in practically every country and, as such, are studied being a meaningful indicator of elite social organization (David and Westerhuis, 2014; Scott, 1991). Most empirical work on business elite networks in the twentieth century looked exclusively at connections within particular countries. The transnational corporate elite was debated and theorized, but, aside from the work of Fennema (1982) and Fennema and Schijf (1985), empirical research remained scarce. In the twentyfirst century, however, increased attention was paid to the transnational network. A follow up study on the pioneering work of Fennema (1982) by Carroll and Fennema (2002) on the transnational network found that twenty years after 1976, the transnational network of interlocking directorates remained remarkably stable. Although it was coined the age of globalization, by the mid-1990s the network of transnational corporate elites still comprised mainly corporate directors and executives from the leading capitalist countries in North America and Europe (see also Kentor and Jang (2004)). In the early years of the twenty-first century, things start to change. By the mid-2000s the top of the transnational network also connected to elites in countries such as India, Mexico, Singapore, Turkey, Brazil and China, leading (Carroll et al., 2010a, pp. 233) to conclude that a transnational capitalist class was “in the making, but not (yet) made”. Most recent empirical work underscores the resilience of the transnational network in the wake of the decline of national network cohesion and point at the increasing relevance of these transnational ties (Heemskerk et al., 2016). A transnational corporate elite may have finally arrived. A consistent but often overlooked finding is that the increase in transnational corporate networks typically does not connect far away regions in the world, but rather integrates business elites that are relatively nearby, such as in Europe, or North America (Carroll et al., 2010a,b; Fennema and Schijf, 1985) And this may have important repercussions for those who expect a transnational corporate elite identity to emerge. After all it is fair to say that a board interlock between a German and a Dutch, an USA and a Canadian, or a Venezuelan and a Colombian firm is qualitatively different from ties that span different regions of the globe, and connect for instance firms in the USA with China, Spain with India, or 3